Although David has blogged about this issue before, he says in his second
post that he may have come off a bit ‘over zealous’ the day before. I’m
not sure that he did, but I might reframe the issue slightly.

Here is the landscape as I see it:

We are rapidly nearing almost-ubiquitous wireless connectivity, at least in
more-advantaged countries. WiMax, EV-DO, and similar,
already-existing technologies show us that this is a thing of the near future,
not dreamy science fiction. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to guess that within
10 to 15 years your wireless device will be able to connect to the Internet at
all times in most places. Even in the wildnerness of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, you’ll be able to
surf the Web (now, whether you would want to or should is a different issue; the
bottom line is that you’ll be able to).

We already have small, portable devices – cell phones, PDAs, laptops – that
can connect to the Internet at fairly reasonable speeds.

We already have pretty decent voice recognition software, even the kind that
doesn’t have to be trained to your individual voice (think, for example,
telephone airline reservations systems). We also have pretty decent
text-to-speech software. Both will continue to improve and surely will be much
better by the time ubiquitous wireless connectivity occurs.

Put these all together and you have a portable device that you can talk to,
that can talk back to you, and that can connect to the Internet anywhere,
anytime. In other words, you can ask the device on your hip a question (What’s the capital of Slovakia? What is a gerund? What is photosynthesis?) and get the answer back as spoken text, as a diagram, as a video, etc., all within reasonable wait time.

Once all of this converges, the question is not “Do students still
need to memorize stuff in school?” There always will be some core knowledge
that students need, if only so that they know enough to be able to access more
complex information that they haven’t memorized and to judge the worth and
credibility of that new information. Instead, I believe the questions
become:

In light of this new information technology / access landscape,what do students still need to memorize?,

What are we now asking students to memorize that they don’t
really need to?, and

How can we better use precious school time?

Note the emphasis on what, not if, in the first question.
While there will be some core that students need to memorize, I’m guessing
that the list will be a lot smaller than it is now (e.g., when’s the last time most
arguably-successful adults used sine, cosine, and tangent? needed to know, without being able to look it up, the difference between an
acute and obtuse angle? needed to use Newton’s Second Law? needed
to name the capital of South Dakota or the fifth U.S. President?).

The fact that technology makes it unbelievably easy to look up almost anything,
factual or otherwise, qualitatively changes the discussion in ways that it never
could when one had to go look something up in a printed book (if there was even
one close enough to be convenient); and

7 Responses to “What do students need to memorize?”

And yet, while I process this all over the next few days to formulate a response, David’s last paragraph in the January 2nd post is what has my mind going:

“Enough said — except that this how theme reminds me of something a superintendent said to me last year (2006) as he was taking me on a tour of his South Dakota district. He said that we are asking to many questions that require an answer, when we should be asking questions that require a conversation.”

I wish someone would hold that discussion within my earshot so that I might hopefully be able to pickup on some kind of a roadmap. I took these thoughts and chewed on them a bit and posted about them on my foreign language learning blog.

At our last meeting we had a didactic vs. constructivist discussion to some extent. Some members of our committee were pretty adamant about the need to establish a base of facts (through direct instruction) in most discipline…

I listened to an interview with Will Richardson and realized I am guilty of having given my students a blog, but not helped them become bloggers. I did not delineate them until Will. But, more than being inspired, I am a bit frustrated
Quoting C…